NZ Trucking Association Summit – Phil Parkes
The 2020 New Zealand Trucking Association Industry Summit took place on Saturday 21 November at Riccarton Racecourse, Christchurch.
According to Phil Parkes, chief executive of Worksafe, 73% of workplace fatalities involve a vehicle. In the year leading up to the summit, he said, the transport industry suffered five fatalities. There were
1440 minor injuries leading to absenteeism; 528 incidences of muscular stress from climbing in and out of vehicles and loading and unloading; 381 falls from height; and
165 cases of people being trapped between moving and stationary vehicles such as forklifts and trucks.
To reduce these figures, Parkes was straightforward: “There’s no secret science. We have to stop doing work in a way that puts people under pressure to cut corners.”
What did he mean by this? Some 95% of the time, explained Parkes, workers worked with workarounds. “They do the work how it’s really done, not how head office thinks or what their health and safety policy says. It’s the workers who do the work who know what it’s really like; they know how to get around procedures that slow them down 20%.
“So, the conversation we have to have is how to set them up for success, give them the opportunity, skills and empowerment to do work efficiently and in a healthy and safe way. That’s about building capacity and resilience in the workplace, making sure the workers are given the freedom to do the job the way they think is best. You can’t do that unless you talk to them. If you sit in head office or contract someone to write a health and safety manual, you’ve missed the opportunity. They won’t read it; 100 pages on a shelf doesn’t work in the field.”
Parkes suggested that the conversation needed to change if we were to impact workplace fatalities and injuries. “We have health and safety conversations, but realistically, 90 percent of Kiwis get turned off before you even get to the ‘and’.
Pretending otherwise is crazy.” He says there’s a way of having such conversations without talking about risk, hazards or “technical stuff that most people don’t care about”.
“Have a conversation about what a good day looks like. You’ll find it looks like, ‘I’m excited to go to work. I have the right tools to do the job, know what I need to do and how to do it. I know when I’ve done a good job.’ As a result, you get to go home safely. Then have a conversation about what a bad day looks like: ‘I’m not sure what I’m doing, haven’t got the right tools, under pressure and can’t get through everything.’
“That’s a risk-assessment conversation; you’ve identified things that could go wrong, the underlying causes of accident or injury. And then we talk about how to
make them better, change the way we do work – that conversation can be had without mentioning health and safety once.”
Parkes said that people were not the problem but the solution and must be allowed to be treated as such.
“We often think in health and safety that people are the problem; they didn’t follow the process or wear their gear or work the right way. People are the solution; if you get the workers to tell you how to do the job, they’ll know the most fast, efficient and safe way to do it because they do it every day. But they need to be given the opportunity to tell you. They won’t do that if they’re scared of you telling them off.
“In every single investigation we do, we find the worker either had a solution or knew they weren’t following procedure, but they had to do it to meet their targets. We always find the workers knew what was happening and most of them say, ‘I tried to tell the bosses, but they don’t listen. They just want us to follow the procedure because they’re worried about liability.’
“It’s a changing mindset from thinking about people as the problem to be controlled to treating them as the solution. They’ll help you redesign the way you do your work. It’ll be more effective and efficient, and you won’t need to do it for health and safety’s sake,” he said.
Parkes said that advocating this approach didn’t mean Worksafe was going soft as a regulator. “We’ve seen what happens when regulators don’t do their core business of holding people to account. If people aren’t meeting standards, undercutting and taking shortcuts, and exploiting workers, we will hold them to account. It’s not about us not doing enforcement; it’s about saying enforcement alone is not going to fix this [problem].”
Regarding the transport sector, Parkes said Worksafe was focussed on two things. The first was the Road to
Zero campaign.
“We can’t differentiate working health and safety from road use; they happen at the same time. A truck is a workplace, but it also interacts with the public roading system, so this needs to be fixed,” he said.
The second focal point was moving up the supply chain. “We’ve spent the past six years focussing on individual businesses, finding out ‘what happened’. We have research that looks at underlying causes to do with supply chain pressures; we know those settings for work
— low margins, high pressure, low job control – are all contributing to people having to cut corners and work in a way that doesn’t work for them and causes injury.
“We have powers under our new legislation, around health and safety by design — how to design equipment and workplaces at the top of the supply chain to make sure they are safe.
“We’re also enabled to [investigate an incident] when we think the cause of is the contractual arrangement by suppliers or customers that pushed the risk down the supply chain,” said Parkes.
“So as part of that contribution to the road strategy, we’ll be thinking about the people who are getting injured, but also who is setting the parameters at work that stop people doing their best work. That lies in all sectors, not just in transport.”